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Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Some thoughts culled from my random file. About faith, love, life and relationship with God. Some have occurred to me in moments of quiet reflection, some in interaction with others. Some are aphoristic and avuncular. Many have been tweets on Twitter and updates on Facebook. For your edification, inspiration and/or motivation — or your money cheerfully refunded.

Faith is not a static moment of belief but an ongoing conversation with God. What is God saying to you? What are you saying to God?

God can handle our honesty. Even our anger and doubt. But He cannot do anything with our deceptions.

Faith is not so much about what you believe as about Who you trust.

God’s word causes things to be. It does not just describe reality, it creates it.

Faith flows with the love of God because faith is relationship with God, who is love.

I am, at any given time, a mixture of motives. Some noble, some not so much. I have my hands full minding my own heart.

Jesus calls us to make disciples, not clones — He’s going to look different on you than on me.

I would rather have one Christian who lives the faith well but cannot argue it than ten who can argue the faith well but do not live it.

Faith in Christ is more than a doctrinal point concerning soteriology, it is a lived-out daily reality.

Faith is trusting Christ with your life.

What if everywhere we went, we prayed, “Kingdom of God, come into this place. Will of God, be done here in this place, just as in heaven”?

You can find a lot of gory images on the internet — even on Facebook! — and it can easily overwhelm. Too much of it can even lead to despair. But there is one gory image that gives hope, and that is the image of Christ on the cross.

In the end, heaven and earth must be joined together, because Jesus is truly God and truly man, and cannot be split in two.

My eschatology is simple: The gospel will prevail and all the nations of the world will be discipled to become followers of King Jesus the Messiah.

Pharaoh needed to let the children of Israel go, but the children of Israel also needed to let Egypt go.

God has no self-appointed, self-anointed gatekeepers.

A person’s socio-economic situation can color how he or she perceives Scripture. Someone on the bottom rungs of society might read certain passages differently than someone who is well-heeled. If we are going to take Scripture seriously, then, we must allow it to challenge our own socio-economic conditioning.

This day, I expect to know God more.

Isn’t it marvelous that, though God gives us all of Himself, we do not lose our own identity — we remain ourselves. You remain you and I remain me, but now the God-filled versions of you and me.

The grace of God, through His power at work in me, is able to do far beyond all I can ask or think — and I’m not done asking and thinking.

Tuesday, September 2, 2014

God is a joyful God. In His presence is fullness of joy, and at His right hand are pleasures forever more (Psalm 16:11). The joy of the Lord is our strength (Nehemiah 8:10). The kingdom of God is about righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit (Romans 14:17). God is not a choice between joy/happiness and holiness. He is not either/or about it; He is both/and. Nobody is truly happy apart from holiness, and a person who is living holy but has no joy in it is doing it wrong. Joy is, as C. S. Lewis said, “the serious business of heaven.”

No doubt, in times of hardship, it can be difficult to be happy — or to live holy. Yet the choice God calls us to make is not between happiness and holiness. It is the choice of happiness through holiness, to know the supernatural joy of the Lord and to experience, as Mike Bickle puts it, “the superior pleasures of loving God.”

Neither holiness nor happiness are necessarily instantaneous. There is an initial sanctification in which God sets us apart for Himself as His own people, and this it what it means to be “holy” — to be “set apart” for God. The Christian life is a life of discipleship, learning what it means to be holy and how to live that out. Christian discipleship, then, is a process of growing in holiness — but also in happiness. “God did not call us to uncleanness, but in holiness,” Paul says (1 Thessalonians 4:7) — but in the same latter in which he also says, “Rejoice always!” (1 Thessalonians 5:17).

Sometimes Christians have excused behavior they know to be unholy with the excuse “God wants me happy.” But the way to correct that error is not by suggesting that God is indifferent or may not want us to be happy after all but, rather, by telling the truth about holiness and happiness: God wants us to be both holy and happy, and the way to happiness is through holiness.

Often enough, I have heard Christians talk down on happiness, saying that God wants you to be holy, not happy — and as I consider their disposition, sometimes I think they really do believe that God does not want them happy! That way of thinking puts happiness and holiness in competition. But the truth is that they are not. God speaks often of happiness in the context of holiness. For example, notice how the book of Psalms opens. It sets the tone for the rest of the psalms:

Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the LORD, and who meditates on his law day and night. (Psalm 1:1-2 NIV)

That is about divine happiness — it is an exclamation: “O the happiness!” or “O the bliss!” It is not about the fleeting thing that the world (the wicked, the sinners, the mockers) reach after and call “happiness,” but which turns out to be a pocketful of lint. It is about the joyful, godly life that God has for us, even in the here and now.

Those who do not understand holiness do not really understand happiness. And those who live holy lives yet are desperately unhappy have not adequately understood holiness. Holiness is a life of intimate fellowship with God, in all weathers. So is happiness.

What I mean by happiness is contentment, peace and joy. No doubt, the culture around us often gets it wrong. But I’m not giving up the word “happiness” for that reason. Rather, I want to show people the way to true and lasting happiness. Because what the world is really seeking is contentment, joy and peace — which is happiness, and what God longs for them all to have. They’re just looking for it in all the wrong places.

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